Yesterday, my husband and I celebrated our thirteenth wedding anniversary. And by celebrated, I mean we made grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids and then fell asleep before ten o’clock.

We’ve been married thirteen years. We’ve been parents for four. For the first nine years, every anniversary was enthusiastically celebrated – dinner, drinks, gifts. For the last four, the celebrations have been a little more quiet – mac and cheese and early bedtimes. It’s not that we don’t want to celebrate – we do – it’s that we simply don’t have the energy (nor do we have a babysitter, but that’s another story). With two small, sleep-averse children, any free time that we have is usually spent power-napping. Who has the will to dress up and sit in a restaurant when you could just fall asleep on the sofa, a cold slice of delivery pizza clutched in your hand?

It’s been a hard year for us – and an exceptionally hard few months – and so the urge to just curl up in our pajamas is stronger than ever. But I think that the need for us to get up and get motivated to find some time for ourselves – as a couple, as two people who are more than just parents – is greater, in some respects than our need to rest. It’s easy to give in to the need to rest. But it’s also easy, in giving in to that need, to give up on other needs.

We’re tired. I’m tired. So tired.

Is there any such thing as a Vacation Fairy? A Dinner Date Godmother? Does the Great Pumpkin deliver spa getaway certificates, complete with nanny service? Because we need that kind of magic, stat.